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This collection brings together the last work Sheldon turned out before she died in 1987 with her husband Huntington. The challenges she was facing with her husband's degrading health and her own depression resulted in some of the darkest work I've read by any author. Even so, this is not pure anger on display. One of the greatest facets of Sheldon's gargantuan imagination was a refusal to settle for one direction in any of her work. Where there is abysmal nihilism, the artists still finds the strength to write stories about it, wrestling with the burdens of life in an act of expressing how the soul itself is smoldering. Some of the finest speculative conditions are thrown to their highest possibilities here: the Devil scheming to literally buy heaven, the Earth itself as a wrathful and personal lover, and corporate cannibalism are all marched out to some of the most heart-rending and shocking conclusions one can think of. Sheldon's bravery was obvious to the end, never relinquishing a crown that, while never appearing in the text, is more than well-earned as a title to this final work.

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"James Tiptree, Jr." was born Alice Bradley in Chicago in 1915. Her mother was the writer Mary Hastings Bradley; her father, Herbert, was a lawyer and explorer. Throughout her childhood she travelled with her parents, mostly to Africa, but also to India and Southeast Asia. Her early work was as an artist and art critic. During World War II she enlisted in the Army and became the first American female photointelligence officer. In Germany after the war, she met and married her commanding officer, Huntington D. Sheldon. In the early 1950s, both Sheldons joined the then-new CIA; he made it his career, but she resigned in 1955, went back to college, and earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology.

At about this same time, Alli Sheldon started writing science fiction. She wrote four stories and sent them off to four different science fiction magazines. She did not want to publish under her real name, because of her CIA and academic ties, and she intended to use a new pseudonym for each group of stories until some sold. They started selling immediately, and only the first pseudonym—"Tiptree" from a jar of jelly, "James" because she felt editors would be more receptive to a male writer, and "Jr." for fun—was needed. (A second pseudonym, "Raccoona Sheldon," came along later, so she could have a female persona.)

Tiptree quickly became one of the most-respected writers in the field, winning the Hugo Award for "The Girl Who was Plugged In" and "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?," and the Nebula Award for "Julie Phillips wrote her biography,
James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

Here is a link to a site which now awards Science Fiction authors and their books under Alice's pen name for literature to represent gender issues within the field of writing. http://www.tiptree.org/